7 Chomsky quotes that expose the American empire

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:47:00 +0000

Noam Chomsky is an expert on many matters -- linguistics, how our economy functions, and propaganda, among others. One area where his wisdom especially shines through is in articulating the structure and functioning of the American empire. Chomsky has been speaking and publishing on the topic since the '60s. Below are seven powerful quotes on the evils, atrocities and ironies of the American empire taken from his personal site and from a fan-curated website dedicated to collecting Chomsky's observations.

1. [In early 2007] there was a new rash of articles and headlines on the front page about the "Chinese military build-up." The Pentagon claimed that China had increased its offensive military capacity -- with 400 missiles, which could be nuclear armed. Then we had a debate about whether that proves China is trying to conquer the world or the numbers are wrong, or something. Just a little footnote. How many offensive nuclear armed missiles does the United States have? Well, it turns out to be 10,000. China may now have maybe 400, if you believe the hawks. That proves that they are trying to conquer the world.

Rethinking “Cosmopolis”

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 18:45:00 +0000

When the novel Cosmopolis first came out in 2003, it was regarded by most reviewers, myself included, as a disappointment. After the vaulting achievements of White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, Cosmopolis seemed like a return to the lesser DeLillo of Running Dog or Great Jones Street — as corrosive in its way as steam-punk, grimly absurdist, hopelessly nihilistic. It didn’t help that the novel, set in Manhattan, was published while the wounds of 9/11 were still fresh. Though the book (and the publicity materials at the time) made it clear the story takes place a year before the Twin Towers’ fall, a lot of us were picking through the book looking for pre-echoes of that tragedy. (His now-classic Harper’s essay of 2002, “In The Ruins of the Future,” had primed everyone for an extraordinary fictional treatment of the theme, though DeLillo didn’t get around to his 9/11 novel till 2008’s The Falling Man.) Re-reading Cosmopolis now, however, in the light of David Cronenberg’s new film adaptation, and given the context of the 2007 global economic meltdown and the Occupy Movement that followed, it appears to me that Don DeLillo has once again taken on the mantle of artist-prophet. Cosmopolis’s grimness — and it is Hell-dark, a near Miltonic vision of greed, chaos, and soul-squandering — is, it turns out, an altogether apt reflection of its theme, which is the remorseless momentum of post-Berlin Wall capitalism, of a New World Order that has no symmetrical foe aside from “terrorism” and which is wedded inexorably to technologies of such seamless, speed-of-light efficiency that it promises the very transcendence of the physical, an escape from mortality itself into the dream-realm of the cybernetic. As Eric Packer, Cosmopolis’s dread anti-hero, would have it: “He’d always wanted to be quantum dust, transcending his body mass, the soft tissue over the bones, the muscle and fat. The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void.”

Salon.com > New World Order

7 Chomsky quotes that expose the American empire

Rethinking “Cosmopolis”